'Community hatred' may lead to social revolution
'Community hatred' may lead to social revolution
JAKARTA (JP): Community distrust and hatred of corrupt
officials has the potential to cause the widely feared social
revolution, an economist and party executive said.
Economist Faisal Basri, who is also secretary-general of the
National Mandate Party (PAN), said on Monday that corruption
"fosters seeds of hatred" which may suddenly explode.
"Corruption from the upper to lower levels of bureaucracy
creates inefficiency and a high cost of living for the people,"
he said.
He was addressing a five-day session of training for activists
involved in the campaign to help raise public awareness of
various forms of official misconduct. The session was held by the
Indonesian Anti-Corruption Forum, which was made up by several
groups including the Indonesian Corruption Watch (ICW), the
Indonesian Transparency Society (MTI), the Indonesian Environment
Forum (Walhi) and the Movement of Concerned Citizens on State
Assets (Gempita).
The 48 participants included activists, officials,
journalists, and representatives of political parties, students
and the private sector.
According to Faisal, three things are needed to eliminate
corruption: a clear and rigid legal system, a restructured
bureaucracy and an active anti-corruption campaign.
Faisal also mentioned the danger posed by corrupt money
politics leading up to the June 7 polls.
"Even now the National Mandate Party is crowded with party
executives who use money to gain support. This is crazy. Amien
Rais (chairman of PAN) was offered a great deal of money by the
Cendana family," he said, referring to the Central Jakarta
residence of former president Soeharto.
"We have to fight this alone. This is very hard but we must
try to be consistent. The future National Election Committee must
draw up a regulation on this."
He said that a member of a corruption watchdog almost bribed
officials to get data of the Timor national car project.
Faisal and Walhi chairwoman Emmy Hafild said corruption was
rooted in business practices here.
"The long-preserved pattern of business patronage gives wide
opportunity for officials to take advantage of their positions by
exchanging services for material payments from interested
business people," Faisal said.
He cited examples of petty corruption, such as bribery
involved in the making of identification cards and other services
illegally given by low ranking members of the bureaucracy.
"The issue of identification cards appears trivial; it is a
habit among people to grease the bureaucratic wheels," Faisal
said.
Corruption on a larger scale, he added, was difficult to
uncover given the higher education of officials involved and the
wide spread of corruption.
He referred to a few cases, including the Golden Key Group
scandal involving credit of Rp 1.3 trillion. Eddy Tansil,
convicted for the corruption case, escaped from jail and was
recently reported to be living in China.
Citing the case of forest management, Emmy said, "There are at
least 14 points of corruption in forest concessions, starting
from the way interested businessmen must look for preliminary
information, recommendations from related departments, the
conducting of surveys up to paying monitoring officials.
"How can a forest supervisor fulfill his duty if he is paid by
the company which runs the forest concession?"
Organizers said that after the information session,
participants would hopefully design methods to curb the spread of
corruption in accordance with conditions in the country.
Among those to address the training program are
representatives of Transparency International Australia,
Transparency International Malaysia and the Australia-based
Independent Commission Against Corruption. (edt)